Customer stories


DotTax

An innovative Phoenix company uses FileMaker Pro to provide drivers and commercial trucking companies with a single comprehensive experience for licensing their vehicles.

A small business with impressive goals for expansion, DotTax of Phoenix, AZ provides an innovative service to the motor transportation industry. Helping truckers and commercial motor carriers navigate a maze of federal and state licensing requirements, DotTax streamlines an often-onerous process with efficient one-stop service. While the firm currently employs from three to five fulltime staffers, there are plans to expand the concept nationwide as a franchise opportunity.


Business challenges

With visions of national growth at the very foundation of the company’s business plan, principal partner Barry Hammond was thinking big from the start. “We started DotTax to create a solution for this particular initiative with the hopes that we could eventually turn it into a franchise serving other states,” he explains. “And if successful at it, we could quite quickly go from being a very small company to a very large company with nationwide requirements. We more or less have to behave like a large company in spite of the fact that often it’s just me and a handful of other employees.”

Effective, specialized data management is essential to the type of work DotTax carries out for its clients--with forms and applications and an overwhelming stack of documentation to process. Coming up with an effective tool for handling that job was an early challenge.

“When we first started we interviewed several local software development companies and explained the challenges we had, and that there was no application available for what we do,” Hammond relates, “and we explained that we wanted one.”

The developers DotTax approached were more than willing to help--but their help carried a whopping price tag--too hefty for a startup. “We’re talking several hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Hammond continues. “I understood where those prices were coming from, but I also understood that the solution could be simpler than that. So we decided to build the tool ourselves, using FileMaker Pro.”


We wanted to create the method that a company like ours would use to be very successful. FileMaker Pro is that method. We build something that software developers wanted to charge us hundreds of thousands of dollars to do--and I’m laughing!

Barry Hammond, principal partner, DotTax


Successful solution

The system Hammond designed for DotTax was originally intended to be a simple prototype, a demonstration application to prove to prospective developers that a product could in fact be efficiently and affordably designed to meet the company’s specific needs --but it’s quickly taken on a life of its own. The basic system brings together all of the information needed to process licensing and regulatory paperwork for the firm’s clients and ensures that each step in the process is completed and documented. “We process forms, we process applications,” Hammond says. “Prior to FileMaker Pro, all of this data was stored in hard files, and what was difficult was that each of our employees would need a certain level of expertise to sift through the various files and find the information needed to meet the specific requirements in different jurisdictions. With FileMaker Pro, we build the expertise into the application.”

The DotTax application consists of one main FileMaker Pro database containing 16 different tables, and tens of thousands of individual records. While it was initially created in FileMaker Pro 5.5, Hammond says he was about 1/3 into his initial objective when FileMaker Pro 7 was launched and the developers from "Waves in Motion" urged him to migrate to the new version.

"We went into it with the idea that we might have to do some things over again. But what we actually found was that we had already done most of the work. A lot of the things stay the same, in terms of calculations, and logic and things of that nature. What goes away in FileMaker Pro 7, is managing all the clutter. In FileMaker 5 and 6 you had different databases essentially, that were much more limited in terms of how you can relate and share date between them, as compared to the tables that you find in FileMaker 7."

And says Hammond, the move to FileMaker Pro 7 has really paid off. " It took us only about two months to migrate and it is the best thing that we've done," he exclaims. "I'm very glad that we did it, because now our solution is much more stable. There's no excessive time on my part, as far as managing the data. No more "where was that stored, and how is that file set up, and is that the current file, or was a copy of it made?" Everything's nice and neat and tight, and in one place."


Customer benefits

FileMaker Pro greatly simplifies the tasks facing DotTax employees by bringing them everything they need to ensure that each form is filed properly, each document completed according to requirements. That’s no small achievement given the ever-changing nature of transportation regulations and licensing standards. Seated before the FileMaker Pro screen, any DotTax employee becomes an instant expert on arcane aspects of regulatory policy, allowing fast and responsive service to clients. “You have a form that should take five minutes to fill out, but because we had to reference all that information in the hard files a five-minute form might take an hour to complete,” Hammond notes. “We have eliminated that need with this solution. Now we’re able to do the same work in five minutes (or less) with just the push of a button. We can service our clients faster, better, and cheaper than the other guy, simply because we don’t face the same workload the other guy faces. There’s a certain reliability that FileMaker Pro is giving us that no one else can give.”

FileMaker Pro 7 allows even greater efficiency of operation. “The ability to build relationships on a range of variables rather than just one variable is one of the things that makes it much more stable and solid,” says Hammond, “and it makes it perform much faster. Our new solution in FileMaker Pro 7, performs the same functions as our earlier version, using a third of the code that the previous version required.”

Best of all, the savings in development costs allow DotTax to focus its resources on building the company rather than building a database. “We wanted to create the method that a company like ours would use to be very successful,” Hammond sums up. “FileMaker Pro is that method. We build something that software developers wanted to charge us hundreds of thousands of dollars to do--and I’m laughing!”



Contact information

Contact Info for Customer:

Barry Hammond
Principal Partner
DotTax
602-393-1290
bhammond@roadandfuel.com
www.roadandfuel.com


Filemaker Contact:

Kevin Mallon
Public Relations Manager
FileMaker Inc.
408-987-7227
kevin_mallon@filemaker.com
http://www.filemaker.com


Overview
  • DotTax's one-stop filing and documentation services help commercial motor carriers to easily comply with state and federal licensing standards.
  • Based in Phoenix, AZ.
  • Approximately 5 employees.
Industry
  • Automotive/Transportation
  • Small Business
Solutions
  • FileMaker Pro database consisting of 16 files, replacing an ample library of hard-copy documentation.
Benefits
  • Regulatory forms are completed and filed from within the FileMaker Pro database system, greatly speeding service to clients.
  • Replacement of hard-copy files with FileMaker Pro database brings all necessary information within reach of any employee, eliminating the need for specialized expertise or training.
  • Internal development of the system saves hundreds of thousands of dollars in external development fees.